Online financial services provided by financial institutions such as banks, credit unions, savings & loans, and brokerage institutions are becoming increasingly popular among consumers as a way to effectively manage their finances. Many people use such services to monitor their bank accounts and cash holdings, securities accounts, savings accounts, and so forth, and utilize financial-institution-provided online bill payment or check writing services. Generally, these online financial services are Internet-accessible via financial institution websites or web pages, including as viewed via mobile devices. As referred to herein, such online financial services type online systems will be referred to as “financial institution portals” or “banking portals,” although other terms may apply to such services by different types of institutions.
In a traditional financial institution portal, users are typically provided with a listing of their accounts, and a further sub-listing of their recent transactions associated with those accounts. Each transaction will often include the date of the purchase or transaction, the amount of the transaction, the form in which the transaction occurred (i.e., check, credit card, etc.), and the retailer, service provider, or other establishment with which the transaction occurred. Based on the details available with each transaction, as well as the ease of use of most online banking portals, many consumers rely heavily on these portals to manage their finances and investments, stay on top of budgets, pay bills, and track their purchases. Additionally, with the advent and increased use of mobile devices (e.g., cell phones, smart phones, PDAs, etc.), consumers have constant access to their online services and accounts.
In order to provide detailed and up-to-date information regarding transactions, purchases, and accounts to portal users, banks and other financial service providers must keep thorough records of those transactions, and employ highly-sophisticated operational systems to maintain and organize such information. Accordingly, banking systems can provide a rich intelligence about the purchasing habits and propensities of consumers. It would be highly beneficial to most advertisers to have access to such detailed purchase information; however, due to strict privacy laws and regulations that limit how financial institutions can share consumer data, advertisers have never been able to access this valuable information.
Certain types of targeted marketing systems are known to be in use. The term “targeted marketing” generally refers to systems that enable the identification of particular classes or segments of consumers and the delivery by advertisers of specialized targeted marketing information and/or offers to such consumers. Consumers are often segmented into classes and subclasses based on age, gender, geography, socio-economic status, types of purchases, and other indicia. The specialized targeted marketing information provided to these identified classes of consumers can include special discounts on product purchases, coupons, rewards program points, or other similar incentives as regards specific products or services provided by advertisers. Generally, the more information known by an advertiser, the more targeted, specialized and valuable advertisements become.
Traditionally, marketers relied on general information such as their own historical sales data or common geographic data in order to target advertisements (in the form of mailers, television advertisements, etc.) to customers. While this type of targeted marketing does provide some benefit over undirected, mass marketing, it is not as specialized or precise as most advertisers would prefer. Even with the advent and widespread use of the Internet (and Internet advertisements), targeting marketing still does not reach the level of detail that would optimize the effectiveness of that marketing.
The ability to target advertisements to individual consumers based on each consumer's actual purchases would provide a highly-effective way to present products and/or services to consumers. For example, each consumer could be presented with advertisements for goods and/or services he or she regularly buys in the hopes of increasing the consumer's purchase of those goods and/or services. Or, the consumer could receive advertisements or offers for goods and/or service that are related to the consumer's past purchases (e.g., if a consumer recently purchased a lawn mower, then ads for related goods, such as lawn fertilizer or a hedge trimmer, could be provided). Additionally, advertisements could be presented based not on the specific goods and/or services purchased, but on peripheral information related to those purchases, such as the consumer's typical purchase amounts (e.g., consumer buys luxury items or is more cost-conscious), the geographic location of the consumer's transactions, the types of merchants at which the consumer often (or rarely) shops, etc. However, because merchants and advertisers do not have access to individual consumer purchase histories (such as the types of products purchased, dates purchased, amounts spent, specific merchants from which items were purchased, etc.), such targeted marketing has traditionally been unavailable.
Further, many types of offers or redemptions associated with targeted marketing campaigns are difficult for consumers to use and problematic for advertisers to track. For example, many consumers are unlikely to use coupons that require printing from a computer or clipping from a newspaper in order to be used. Accordingly, many consumers ignore such coupons and their associated advertisements.
Another issue related to traditional targeted marketing systems is that advertisers generally only have records as to their own sales data, and they do not have access to information regarding how much consumers spend or how often consumers shop at competitors of the advertisers, or even at unrelated advertisers. Such transaction data, if available, could prove invaluable for marketing and profitability purposes. As an example, one class of consumers could be that of purchasers of home-delivered pizzas. An advertiser (e.g., hypothetical advertiser “Pizza Pub”) that delivers pizzas to the homes of customers may rely on past purchases or demographic information within a community to target mailers or television advertisements to those consumers. However, if that advertiser had access to information relating to existing customers of a competitor (e.g., hypothetical merchant “Pizza King”), then the advertiser could target advertisements to the competitor's customers in the hopes of drawing them away from the competitor. Further, the advertiser could then analyze information about the competitor's customers to determine what made the customers choose the competitor's product initially. Naturally, however, it is difficult for advertisers in most markets to obtain marketing intelligence about consumers of their competitors.
Additionally, financial institutions are always looking for ways to boost their revenue streams and increase customer loyalty. Presentation of valuable marketing offers (such as rebates or savings on goods and/or services) to consumers that use particular financial institution accounts is one way to increase loyalty and entice consumers to use payment mechanisms associated with those accounts (i.e., credit cards, bank cards, etc.). However, most banks lack the internal infrastructure necessary to effectively integrate advertisements from third parties into their existing financial institution portals. If an advertiser could work with a bank to extend offers to its customers based on the bank's knowledge of what its customers purchase, while preventing the advertiser from accessing sensitive or consumer-identifying data, then that information could be used to provide valuable and targeted marketing offers to consumers that are easy for the consumers to redeem, which would in turn lead to greater profits and increased customer loyalty for all parties involved.
Therefore, there is a long-felt but unresolved need for a system or method that interacts seamlessly with sophisticated banking systems and online banking portals, or other transaction-centric information portals or data repositories, to provide targeted marketing offers and advertisements to users of those portals, wherein such targeted marketing is related to each user's transactions and purchases displayed at the portal, as well as the user's purchase histories and/or spending habits. There is a further need for a system or method that enables simple and straightforward redemption of targeted marketing offers while still allowing merchants and advertisers to track the effectiveness of their targeted marketing campaigns. There is yet a further need for a system or method that provides such targeted marketing to financial institution customers without violating privacy laws and obtaining confidential customer information.